Swiped from Patricia Fara, whose lecture I have just begun to watch. [Added: and it's not at all yet another talk on how Darwin rules and wingnuts lose. Give it a look.]
[Added] Dr. Fara says a few moments after showing the above slide that the picture on the right was the prize-winning entry in a 2008 contest called "Designing Darwin," sponsored by the British Society for the History of Science. More here. Worth clicking over to see the original and some of the runners-up.
Missing punctuation? Or another revealing instance of how liberals' disregard for life knows no end???1?
(h/t: CKC, via email)
Hmmm. This looks promising ...
Lotta wear and tear on this poster:
Now, this is a new one on me:
That guy to the left? I got him to the point of veins bulging all out of his forehead.
Also, who knew you could spray when you hiss liberal?
Good times.
No, that's not a still from 2001, although at first glance, it does look like it could be, doesn't it? Actually, it's an artist's conception of NuSTAR in orbit around the Earth.
NuSTAR (short for Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope ARray) has apparently launched successfully (press release | Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog post). It is a space-based observatory designed to focus on high energy x-rays, which, National Geographic says, will allow it to:
... capture images of black holes, neutron stars, and other cosmic bodies with a hundred times more sensitivity and ten times better resolution than previous spacecraft.
The way it got into space was by being attached to a rocket, which was attached to an airplane, which flew up to 40,000 feet and dropped it. Five seconds later, the first of the rocket's three stages fired:
The satellite is stored on the rocket in a collapsed state -- only two meters long. Once in orbit, it extends to ten meters long.
The launch system, called Pegasus, is claimed by its owner, Orbital Sciences Corporation, to be the "world's first privately developed space launch vehicle." Its maiden launch was in 1990 (!).
More pix in the gallery, hosted on the mission home page, via NASA.
(h/t: KK, via email)
I have always counted on Doghouse Riley to keep me on an even keel about David Brooks's lifetime sinecure at the NYT, but …
My theory is that Bobo’s primary purpose in writing columns these days is to provide material for Pierce.
… I can't argue too much with that.
Especially when you get bonus nuggets like this:
It was time for his daily walk with Geppetto, the busboy who worked the kitchen, as opposed to Douthat, the busboy who worked the big parlor with the fireplace and got all the good tips at Christmastime.
That calls for our favorite flowchart, wouldn't you say?
(title: cf.)
Rodriguez smoked the ball over the left-field wall, where it landed in the hat of a 15-year old Yankees fan from North Carolina who said he made the five-hour drive south to see his favorite team play for the first time.
Congratulations, A-Rod. That's a record I thought would never be tied. And it was awfully nice of you to get it done during a commercial break of the NBA finals, so I could see it live.
Call him Slappy now, all you LGM haters.
[Added] Speaking of whom, and of the NBA finals, don't miss this.
[Added2] Good post here.
Probably unfair of me to lift these three paragraphs only out of David V. Mason's op-ed, but I couldn't resist.
I’m with Harry Emerson Fosdick, the liberal Protestant minister and former pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan, who wrote that he would be “ashamed to live in this generation and not be a heretic.” Being a Christian so often involves such boorish and meanspirited behavior that I marvel that any of my Mormon colleagues are so eager to join the fold.
[...]
Eventually, Mormonism will grow up. Maybe a Mormon in the White House will hasten that moment when Mormonism will no longer plead through billboards and sappy radio ads to be liked, though I suspect that Mr. Romney is such a typical politician that, should he occupy the Oval Office, he’ll studiously avoid the appearance of being anything but a WASP. This could set back the cause of Mormon identity by decades.
Whatever happens in November, I hope Mormonism eventually realizes that it doesn’t need Christianity’s approval and will get big and beat up all the imperious Christians who tormented it when it was small, weird and painfully self-conscious. Mormons are certainly Christian enough to know how to spitefully abuse their power.
It'll be interesting to survey Greater Wingnuttia's reaction to this. I suspect the consensus will congeal around yelling about the NY Times "trying to drive a wedge." And of course, being haters of Christianity.
... but I ended up loving it. It's "Jonah Lehrer on The Science of Creativity."
I was worried that it would be hand-wavy to the point of distraction, but it's really not. To the extent that we know anything in a truly scientific sense about creativity, Lehrer seems to have it all at his fingertips. Plus, he's a really good speaker, both in his presentation and in the Q&A. I would be shocked if you did not learn at least a couple new things.
The talk itself is about thirty-seven minutes long, and the Q&A is about twenty-six.
(alt. video link | HD video link)
P.S. The link to the grit survey mentioned during the talk is partway down this page. I have not yet taken it, since I'm pretty sure it'll be terribly confirming of my self-impression. But maybe after another coffee, or beer, or hot shower, or walk.
Following up from the previous post, check out the disturbing tale at the House of Substance.
Think they've changed any since then? I'm betting yes -- they're probably worse now.
Gail Collins has a piece in The New York Review of Books on a subject observed on this blog from time to time. Collins's piece, it says here, is a reworked excerpt from her new book, As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda.
(h/t: Ars Editor's Picks)
Why do people so often say Put on your shoes and socks and Take off your socks and shoes?
From the annals of two nations separated by a common language? Or just a mistake? Current residents of my ancestral home: please advise.
If you're wondering why I was reading Irish Central, it's because it was the first source that popped up when I news-Googled Bill Maher Mets, because I heard some wingnut yelling about those two topics on the radio a day or two ago, and wondered why. Now we know.
Tattoo of Leviticus 18:22 forbidding homosexuality: £200. Not knowing that Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos: Priceless. twitter.com/pocahontasshol…
— King Cogidubnus (@pocahontasshole) May 22, 2012
David Zaslav of Discovery predicted that a company would sell a package of cable channels via the Internet at some point.
At some point.
Okay, it's just a caption. Maybe there's more context in the article.
Remember the irritations of the 1990s, when sites all too often behaved differently when visited with different browsers, and some wouldn't work at all unless you used the increasingly non-standards-compliant browser from the most powerful software company of the day?
Boo hiss for today's Google Doodle:
Dude, I'm using the latest version of Firefox. That IS a modern browser, and this Doodle doesn't do anything in that. And no, I am not going to visit your home page using Chrome.
When you're even pissing off your fanboys, you're doing it wrong.
British and Australian readers, please advise. Ben Yagoda says:
Arse and ass look different in print. However, in Britain, where non-rhotic (that is, silent r) pronunciation is the standard, they would sound the same.
(Many of his commenters dispute his assertion.)
... when you go to read the story of the family feud and consequent beans-spilling about the financial schemes and opulent lifestyle of the Crouch family, founders and owners of TBN, "the world’s largest Christian television network."
But also remember that tidbits like these, from the article and accompanying slide show, …
Mr. and Mrs. Crouch have his-and-her mansions one street apart in a gated community here, provided by the network using viewer donations and tax-free earnings. But Mrs. Crouch, 74, rarely sleeps in the $5.6 million house with tennis court and pool. She mostly lives in a large company house near Orlando, Fla., where she runs a side business, the Holy Land Experience theme park. Mr. Crouch, 78, has an adjacent home there too, but rarely visits. Its occupant is often a security guard who doubles as Mrs. Crouch’s chauffeur.
[...]
Mrs. Crouch with her two Maltese dogs, constant companions. In 2008 and 2009, she rented adjacent rooms in a hotel, one for herself and another for the dogs and her clothes, according to Ms. Koper and Troy Clements, a former executive at the Holy Land Experience. She kept a costly motor home, originally purchased to serve as an office, for two years as an air-conditioned sanctuary for her pets, two former employees said.
[...]
“My job as finance director was to find ways to label extravagant personal spending as ministry expenses,” Ms. Koper [a granddaughter of the Crouches] said. This is one way, she said, the company avoids probing questions from the I.R.S. She said that the absence of outsiders on TBN’s governing board — currently consisting of Paul, Janice and Matthew Crouch — had led to a serious lack of accountability for spending.
Ms. Koper and two former TBN employees also said that dozens of staff members, including Ms. Koper, chauffeurs, sound engineers and others had been ordained as ministers by TBN. This, she said, allowed the network to avoid paying Social Security taxes on their salaries and made it easier to justify providing family members with rent-free houses, sometimes called “parsonages.” Colby May, a lawyer representing TBN, said the network ordained people who felt a true “ministerial call.”
… are a thoroughly unsurprising outcome of allowing "churches" and other "religious activities" to go untaxed.
__________
P.S. The Holy Land Experience theme park charges admission, of course, but if all the preaching of the prosperity gospel makes you feel like the ticket prices just don't soak you enough, you'll be happy to learn that you can help in other ways.
Truth in advertising? Or just a Freudian slip?
"I can cast out either one of your demons, but not both of them." — the XORcist.
↑David Gillen, RTed by Henry Farrell.
(?)
Ah, yes. The Heartland Institute. A monument to budding astroturfers everywhere.
Heard about their latest billboard campaign?
In opening the campaign, Heartland had said that Mr. Kaczynski would not be the only persona gazing down on Chicago’s commuters. Among his brethren would be Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee, the institute said.
[...]
The institute chose to feature “some of the world’s most notorious killers” on the billboards “because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the ‘mainstream’ media and liberal politicians say about global warming,” Heartland said at its Web site.
The institute’s site did acknowledge that “not all global warming alarmists are murderers and tyrants.”
So we got that going for us.
Which is nice.
(h/t: KK, via email)
One of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
-- Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein
Which, y'know, is not news to you. But I found it rather impressive that this appears in a book written by a couple of long-time Beltway insiders, one from the palace of center-rightism and the other from The American Enterprise Institute.
The comedy begins when one of the permanently cowed crowd over at Nice Polite Republicans | Morning Edition, whence the above was obtained, does his tote-baggin' best to make the Both Sides Are Just As Bad argument, since a portion of the book talks about the MSM compounding the problem by pretending that Both Sides Are Just As Bad.
Longer excerpts from It's Even Worse Than It Looks are available here and here. The second link is worth visiting just to see the wingnuts furiously giving it a one-star review.
Okay, a day late. But Pete Stark, Mayor Anthony Foxx of Charlotte, NC and the city council of New Orleans all deserve shoutouts nonetheless.
Even if the phrase "One Nation Under God" is enshrined in the Constitution and the now-annual National Day of Reason was just some sop tossed to a fringe group in 1952, I mean.
I think the teevees are especially spot-on.
As one measure of how the US is seen by many outside its borders, note (by hovering over the thumbnails) the number of non-English language sites where this image appears.
(h/t: Mathis Amicucci/Diaspora)
This talk at Google, which just got posted yesterday, is well worth your time, particularly if you are one of those people whose attitude is more or less Remember what it felt like in 2008? And now …? Meh.
You might also have a look at the website RebuildTheDream.com and the book of the same name [Powells | B&N | Amazon].
Even for renowned science fiction authors.
Here is John Scalzi speaking at Google on 27 April 2007, just five short years ago. Start listening at 18:28 and let it run for about five minutes.
No diss, and I'm sure he's had this pointed out before. I also think he's an insightful guy about a whole lot of things. I just thought this was kind of funny.
On the surface, sure, it seems like a good idea.
The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.
What about that, Paul Ford? Think Mark wants to resell your kidneys?
There was a brief flurry a few days ago over hints that the National Football League is considering doing away with the Pro Bowl. Do we care? I doubt it. I don't think I've ever watched it. But this picture is definitely worth sharing.
(h/t: Danger Guerrero/Kissing Suzy Kolber)
__________
P.S. If you're wondering how I ended up on a site called "Kissing Suzy Kolber," it was due to Googling and Deadspin, after seeing her heretofore unfamiliar name mentioned, in a more weighty piece about one of my favorite sportswriters, Joe Posnanski.
